Thread by @TimWattsMP

The media tour promises me this is a ‘policy’ book.

Given I’ve taken issue with Barnaby’s policy stands in the past (particularly his claimed powers to control commodity prices) I thought I’d give this a read & try to engage with the content.

Will thread observations here👇

First observation is that this is the first policy tome I’ve read that’s plastic sealed.

Barnaby seems to be having a crack at people airport bookstores for thinking above their station in this par - which is a weird set up for this comment about the quality of regional public schools...

Disclosure - I went to state schools in regional Australia growing up and have also been known to shop in airport book stores.

I’m not sure where that leaves me in Barnaby’s class system.

I am of course now waiting in anticipation for the chapter where Barnaby recents from his support for cutting billions from needs based school funding in Australia - and the impact of this on “Turdsville State”.

Getting the identity politics in early here - regional schools aren’t adequately funded because Australia doesn’t care about “poor whites” apparently.

1. The kids doing it toughest at the regional state schools I went to were largely indigenous.

2. The ABC was a way of life where I grew up because it was the ONLY media organisation that covered the issues affecting rural and regional Australia in depth.

3. Haven’t Barnaby and the Nats represented these areas for decades? What have they been doing?

🤔

No.

I don’t even know what to do with this. We forget April, yet we desire it. #desireforapril

Barnaby says the town of Danglemah means ‘long-tailed goanna’ ‘to his best deduction’ but ‘that part of the Aboriginal language and history is lost’.

Given that he doesn’t seem to have asked any local indigenous people about this, can anyone fact check this?

Despite bagging the ABC pages earlier, Barnaby recalls that the ABC was the only television station that broadcast to his childhood home.

The relative social status of the people Barnaby writes about suffuses every page of this book - he’s truly obsessed with the idea that everyone (in RARA as well as the cities) is looking down on anyone who doesn’t earn as much as they do.

He claims solidarity with “A white tribe from a small country village”

A lot of talk about the importance of connection with place and the land (which I feel too).

But no mention of any indigenous Australians from those areas yet or what it might mean to them.

“Poor white village” references coming every seven pages so far

Barnaby’s primary school teacher at Woolbrook was a communist. No joke.

Apparently not all forms of multiculturalism are a problem for Barnaby.

Time for another black rat

A lot of stories about cars that Barnaby had that broke down.

None as good as the time I wrote off my Holden Sandman when I hit a kangaroo outside Goondiwindi at 4 in the morning.

That’s disappointing- only one paragraph on Barnaby’s failed period as Shadow Finance Minister for OL Tony Abbott.

No repetitions of his crazy predictions that Australia would default on its debt (despite it more than doubling since then).

He does see his time as Shadow Finance Minister being subject to a ‘media jihad’ though - which he intimates was encouraged Joe Hockey.

Conservatism according to Barnaby:

✅ “stability over desire”
✅ “maintaining the social contract of manners”
✅ “moderation”
✅ “self-discipline”

❌ “boring”
❌ “puritanical”
❌ “does not have to mean right wing”

Barnaby is unhappy with the quality of schools in rural and regional Australia but the only option he offers for improving them is funding private schools for ‘choice’ and ‘competition’.

Barnaby thinks private land tenure shouldn’t be impinged on by environmental regulations like land clearing bans and water management laws.

The point of this par on Australian educational standards is somewhat undermined by the editing.

Barnaby wants more Australians to study science - but he explicitly makes it clear that he does not want people studying climate change. Just science that has “immediate benefit or return from the land”.

Barnaby wants to use Canberra as “a template of how we can build other cities elsewhere”.

Wants a city of 100k between Darwin and Townsville and a ‘large city’ on our North-West Coast.

“Canberra only exists because people live there and most of them live there in their house.”

Without going into the weeds of the economics of FDI, there is at least one significant distinguishing factor between US, Japanese or Chinese interests purchasing Australian agricultural land and European colonisation of Hong Kong, India and Belgium....

Tapped the mat last night 3/4 though, but back this morning with a few more observations...

Genuine question - obviously the pejoratives Barnaby cites here aren’t equivalents to the n word, nor is the structural disadvantage of people in RARA analogous to that experienced by POC.

But as a factual matter are people from RARA ‘pilloried’ in the way Barnaby describes?

Barnaby says our nation is ‘failing’ disadvantaged people and ‘what a govt can do is create and architecture that promotes opportunities’ - agreed!

But he continually frames this as an issue for ‘white people in the country’..

Yet another “Poor white towns” reference - in my experience of RARA you don’t have to look too hard to find indigenous Australians in these communities.